![]() It was a past I was jealous of, and that was why we rarely talked about it. While there, she finished college, got married, and quickly divorced. She had spent a few years living in the U.S.: her father had gone to earn some fast cash, then brought her over, too. And now she always resurfaces in my mind along with a line from my favorite poet, Tom Waits: She was a middle-class girl. . . . She was quoting Serhiy Zhadan, her favorite poet: “ Ya liubliu tsiu krainu navit bez kokainu”-“I love this country even without cocaine.” I prosaically chimed in, “And without antidepressants, either.” It was then that she stopped taking antidepressants she said they made her gain weight-the only vanity I noticed in her in all those years. The wet autumn leaves stuck to the footpaths of the Storozhynets Arboretum, in Chernivtsi, where we had gone just to take a stroll-likely the only people ever to make a daylong excursion to have a look at a city where, when push comes to shove, there’s nothing much worth looking at. Or the people with gray faces, smileless and weary after a long shift, on the buses of Donetsk. ![]() We had a meal there-for less than a dollar, if you add it up-of mashed potatoes with a sun of butter melted in the center of the plate, pork chops fried to a crisp, and homemade sour-cherry juice in tumblers. ![]() Or the more tender things: the slightly squat, chubby mother and daughter speaking Surzhyk, that slangy combo of Russian and Ukrainian, so alike in appearance-dark, cropped hair, their faces wide, a deep beet-colored flush on their cheeks-who wouldn’t have been all that pretty if it weren’t for the huge, kind gray-green eyes that made them beautiful! They were the proprietors of a cheap café at the bus station of a nameless town, with tables covered with oilcloth carelessly slashed by the knives of previous guests, which the daughter rubbed with a gray rag before bringing out plates of food that her mother had prepared for us. The cheap train-station food, like cabbage-filled patties or meat pies wrapped in paper even back then I wondered why it was that she didn’t at all care about her health. The instant coffee in plastic cups and the plasticky sausages in hot-dog buns. The sour smell of the alcohol that was poured in semidarkness on the lower bunks of the economy-class sleeper car while we were trying to fall asleep on the top ones. The obligatory multi-hour sessions of awful comedy shows like “Evening Quarter.” The flat-screen TVs at the fancier bus stations, like Dnipro, where the thrash on the speakers was even harsher-like that little rap that goes, “The best feeling’s when you’re the coolest of ’em all”-and performed by Ukrainians who write their names in the Roman alphabet because they think it will be more familiar and appealing in the West. The random thrashiest of thrash metal on intercity buses. We felt a melancholy love for precisely everything in Ukraine that annoyed many of our acquaintances. We shivered in the blue twilight, but we were happy. Guys in Soviet-style Zhiguli four-doors were giving us rides, no problem, but each time they’d give us a lift for only a few kilometres, then drop us at the side of the road and turn off toward their villages. ![]() We made it there on buses and headed back on foot along a snow-covered road, hand in hand. It’s the easternmost point of the country. ![]() Only once were we late for work on a Monday-when we were hitchhiking back from Milove, in the Luhansk region, in January. And, in Ukraine, you can get far in the course of a weekend. And that was how she and I loved each other, too-through pain and a bit frantically.Īlmost every weekend, she and I would get on a train or a bus and head off somewhere. A love in defiance of pain, she used to say. A love with a dash of masochism, I used to say. She and I converged on a sullen love for our country. ![]()
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